Perfect Mate Read online

  “We don’t have time for this, Lilly.”

  He lifted a hand to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear. As though he couldn’t stop touching her, he stroked a gentle finger down her cheekbone to the corner of her lips. It took everything she had not to turn her head and press into the small caress, but she held true to her purpose, her eyes on his.

  “Make time.”

  His lips quirked, and everything female in her went into meltdown. He had to know the effect he had on women, so she ignored the reaction and met him look for look.

  “Stubborn little minx.”

  She choked. “What did you call me?”

  “Minx,” he repeated, lowering his head and brushing his lips over hers to silence her. As a tactic, it worked. The first touch of his lips, warm and firm over hers, was like setting light to kindling. Heat flared and caught, racing through her body like wildfire.

  She moaned, unable to stop her lips parting automatically in invitation. No matter what her mind was screaming about the dead guy in the next room and the possibility the hunk stood in front of her wasn’t just human, her body knew what it wanted, and what it intended to get.

  He didn’t pass up the invitation. Groaning, he moved closer and deepened the kiss. With a ruthless sweep of his tongue, he parted her lips farther and slid into the softer recesses of her mouth. She shivered, hot and cold chills chasing over her skin as he kissed her in the darkness of the corridor.

  She’d been kissed before and, as she’d thought anyway, she’d been kissed well. This was something else entirely. He kissed her as if there was nothing else in the world. As if she was his sun, his moon and stars…his everything. He didn’t kiss her, he made love to her with his lips and tongue.

  Abruptly he broke away, tearing his mouth from hers. With a groan of frustration, he leaned forward to rest his forehead against hers.

  “I don’t want to let you go.” The tone in his voice pulled on her heartstrings. “When they brought me in, there was just pain and blood…so much blood. Darkness was coming for me, and I was ready. But an angel called my name… I had to come back to see if she was as beautiful as she sounded.”

  His words reached deep inside her. She already thought he was gorgeous, but to have him spouting words that…romantic wasn’t the word. The claim he’d come back just to see her, that hit her deep down and resonated in her soul.

  “And…?”

  She almost dared not ask the question, and when she did, her voice emerged breathy and hopeful. Like a teen finally meeting and speaking to her film idol in the flesh.

  “Oh yes, she was worth it.”

  “Hey you, what are you—holy shit! Sound the alarm, the Alpha’s loose.”

  Fuck…ing hell. Just what he needed.

  Jack sighed and stole another kiss. Just one. Nothing more than a peck on her lusciously soft lips. He couldn’t linger, couldn’t risk it. He needed to deal with those guards now. Even after he’d had his guts shredded and pushed a truckload of silver out through his pores, two guards were little more than a light workout. The rest he’d rather pick off one by one, preferably before the call came in from Project headquarters to check in on Walker’s pager alert.

  Putting temptation aside, he tucked Lillian behind the steel supply cabinet. What she’d seen with Walker was just the tip of the iceberg. She didn’t need to see this, didn’t need to see the full horror of his animal side. Not yet.

  “Stay put. Don’t look,” he ordered in an undertone. “Hey guys.” He held his hands out to the side as he started walking toward the two guards at the end of the corridor. Both looked like rabbits caught in the headlights. “How’s it hanging?”

  Adrenalin pumped through his body as he walked, feet cold on the linoleum flooring. Within him, his beast howled and yammered to be free. To burst from the confining human form and race down the corridor free.

  Even dulled by this shape, his expanded senses fed him information. He could smell their fear. Hear the pounding of their hearts in twin panicked rhythms. Sense the hot rush of blood just under their skin.

  “Stay right there.”

  One of them managed to snap out of it, fumbling with the pistol holstered at his hip. When he managed to pull the weapon free, his hand shook.

  “I—I’m not kidding. Drop and spread ’em. Or—or else!”

  Jack kept walking. His body surged with power, the stresses of the last forty-eight hours gone as if they’d never been. The moon was up, his mate was within reach and he felt good. A low snarl rumbled up from his chest. Forget lean, mean fighting machine. He was lethality in motion.

  Not stopping, he reached inside himself and opened the cage that kept the beast confined. Just a little, no more than a crack. Power and pain flooded through him in equal amounts, filling his body and surging through his veins like molten metal.

  “Or else what?”

  His voice was low, gruff. More like a growl than human. Both guards had been with the Project long enough to know what that meant. The acrid stink of fresh urine filled the corridor as the one on the left pissed his pants.

  His teeth clenched, he grabbed the fiery wolf by its tail and molded it, shaping it to his needs and his will. Change, change, change. He forced the shift down to his hands. Bones cracked, breaking as they lengthened. Skin slid and popped over the changing shape. His fingers stretched, talons sprouting until he sported a set that would make any self-respecting wolfman pale in envy.

  He didn’t give them a chance to reply. The next step brought him within striking distance. The guard on the right gasped, the muzzle of his gun shaking as he started to squeeze the trigger. The one on the left fumbled with the restraining clip on his holster.

  Jack’s eyes narrowed, his world focused on that finger and its progress as it tightened. Time slowed to a crawl, the corridor around them went gray and out of focus. He moved, his motions seeming slow as the seconds spun out. He swept his arm up in an arc, claws fully extended.

  The pistol clicked as the trigger reached first pressure. The tiny sound was like a gunshot to his sensitive ears. His human brain fed him what was happening inside the pistol, but his animal side didn’t care. Talons connected, cutting through skin, muscle, sinew, and bone like a hot knife through butter as he completed the arc.

  The pistol fired. Screams filled the corridor. The smell of blood blossomed, full and heavy. Cordite joined it, the two blending into an evocative smell that teased his wolf into a blood-frenzy.

  Jack didn’t let it. He held onto control by the thinnest of threads, aware of the woman hiding behind the heavy metal cabinet. With bullets flying around as they were, the last thing he needed was her loose and in the mix. It would only take a stray bullet…

  Using the power he’d unleashed, he channeled it into action. The guard’s hand bounced off the floor, leaving a red smear as it rolled. Jack ignored it, side-stepping to land a solid kick in the injured guy’s gut. He went down, curling around his damaged arm like a fetus in the womb. Already he was starting to fit, his body stiffening as the drugs in his system reacted to the Lycan infection introduced by Jack’s claws.

  Jack didn’t stop moving. Using his momentum, he bounced off the floor and back up into the attack. The second guard didn’t clear leather before Jack was on him. He grabbed the hand covering the weapon and wrenched it loose, holster and all. It slammed into the wall behind them with a dull thud at the same time Jack twisted the guard’s wrist out from his body.

  With a quick spin, he had the smaller man in the cradle of his embrace. But even if Jack had been so inclined, this was no lover’s clinch. His free hand smoothed over the guys throat, the razor sharp claws tickling over his Adam’s apple as it bobbed up and down. He babbled unintelligibly, another wave of urine stench washing over him as he lost control of his bladder again. Jack felt no pity. This was the guy who’d laughed in the blood wagon when Jack’s guts were on display.

  “Too slow. Way too slow. You should have picked another career,” he whispered
and drew his claws lightly across the man’s throat. The cut wasn’t serious—it barely broke the surface. A solitary bead of blood rolled down to the starched uniform collar.

  The wound wouldn’t kill him, but it was still a death sentence.

  Even though, she had to be up and around during the day, Antonia was very much a nocturnal creature. She could tolerate the sun, and indeed had to, but for the most part it left her wanting to curl up and sleep somewhere warm.

  Garry had told her it was because her body had changed. He’d thrown big words around, but the basics had boiled down to the fact she’d switched to cold-blooded rather than warm. Her metabolism, always high, had gone into meltdown. When active, her readings were off the chart, but if she wanted to she could just stop, shutting everything down until she resembled an incredibly detailed, lifelike statue.

  To say it freaked out the medical staff was an understatement, and Antonia was probably the only person ever to have been barred from the camp mess hall.

  Ops had only wanted her to sign off on reports. Paperwork never quit, even when you were “dead” to all intents and purposes. Still fully clothed, she lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The room was small but private. At first she’d thought it a luxury; now she realized it was little more than another prison. Sure, the lock on the door had been deactivated now, but it hadn’t always been. In the early days, just after her “accident”, they’d locked her in here from sundown to sunup on the thinking that she and the rest of the Bloods were less dangerous during the day.

  A snort of amusement escaped her. Yeah right, the day any Blood was harmless was the day Barney became President.

  She went back to counting paint blots above her. She’d been up all day, but sleep was proving to be elusive. Counting paint blots was marginally better than counting sheep. Counting sheep became counting bags of blood running around on little woolly legs. Which made her hungry, made her fangs drop and burn, and soured her temper even more than normal.

  She tilted her head…had that been two or three blots? She counted it as two and moved on. Interestingly, since her accident, she hadn’t had PMS or even a period. One of the upsides of being a vampire, because even she wouldn’t want to see a vamp with PMS.

  The room lights were off, but she didn’t need light to see. Another benefit of her new existence. At least it would be if normal light didn’t give her a blinding headache. The sort of headache that felt like a spitfire was trying to take off inside her head, and no amount of over the counter medicine could deal with it.

  At three hundred blots, a door opened down the hall and footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. Stopping her count, she listened as they approached. Lifting her chin, she scented the air. Human, male and scared out of his wits. The scent of fear clogged the air, like thick incense.

  Three doors away. Two doors.

  How had they gotten a human to come down here at this time of night? It was bad enough trying to get them to come in here in the daylight, when they were all safe and secure in the knowledge that vampires were “docile” in the day. Yeah right… She gargled holy water and shit garlic.

  One door, and the footsteps carried on. Antonia held her breath and waited for the sharp rap on her door.

  “Major Fielding? You’re needed in the Operations office.”

  Without conscious thought, she was off the bed and headed for the door. The guy the other side, a corporal, yelped and jumped as she yanked it open less than a second after he’d spoken.

  “For? I do sleep, you know.”

  She glared at him, the look in her eyes deliberately glacial. Even though she hadn’t been asleep and his arrival was a welcome distraction from her contemplation of the ceiling’s paint job, she was still offshift. A familiar resentment filled her. She was fed up with the Project snapping its fingers and expecting her to jump.

  “Uhmm…they didn’t say. J-just that you’re needed.” The corporal paled, appearing to realize that he stood in the middle of vampire country, facing down the queen bitch herself. The pissed-off queen bitch.

  A bead of sweat ran from his hairline and rolled down his brow. His gaze shifted sideways to the door.

  “You’d never make it in time,” she informed him softly, amused that any human thought he could outrun her. He paled even further, his lip quivering. Antonia shook her head and decided to give him a break. He was so scared that baiting him seemed cruel. Like kicking a puppy.

  ”Operations? We may as well go.”

  Stepping out through it, she pulled the door shut behind her and started to walk up the corridor. It was a long walk to the outer door, the expanse of wall broken at regular intervals by doors. Each had a lock. Most were active.

  A low moaning sob emanated from the last one as they passed it. A sound of misery and hopelessness that evolved into rage and frustration, then back again. Antonia’s jaw tightened. She recognized the sound of a newly turned Blood suffering their first thirst. Remembered the endless night she woke feeling like her body, her very blood, was boiling. The pain was excruciating, something she wouldn’t wish on her worse enemy.

  She’d drunk gallons of water, only to throw it back up. Soda tasted worse—fizzy acid. White wine? Paint stripper. There were only two things even slightly palatable: port and, of course, blood.

  Chapter Five

  It didn’t take long to reach Operations. In point of fact, it didn’t take long to walk across the entire camp. The part that was habitable, anyway. Built way back when, it had been abandoned for years before the Project had come along. Most of the buildings were still uninhabitable, apart from a main core around the central hub.

  Well, inhabitable was a relative term, she thought as she passed the Lycan kennels. They’d thrown up some silver-banded steel fencing and let the dogs loose in what amounted to little more than huge dog pens. Her lip curled again as she passed, the stench wafting toward her on the night breeze. She wouldn’t be surprised if they had to send someone in every day to muck them out.

  “Freaking animals,” she muttered, unable to keep her prejudice to herself. Before she’d become changed, she hadn’t had any feelings one way or the other about Bloods or Lycans, other than the fact both freaked her out. They were all the same to her. People who’d been willing test subjects or those unfortunate enough to be infected. She hadn’t counted on the fact that when the Project ran out of willing test subjects, it created its own.

  And she certainly hadn’t counted on the rush of complete and utter hatred the first time she’d seen a Lycan after her infection. Anger had welled up from her very core, as though her soul itself rejected the idea of the creature in front of her. Her fangs had dropped, despite the sedative they had her on, and it had taken all her self-control not to rip its throat out right there.

  “Sorry?” The corporal leaned forward trying to catch her whispered words, a look of puzzlement on his face.

  She shook her head and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Still, she shot a glance over her shoulder at the dark and silent Lycan pens as she walked through the door into the office. As far as she was concerned, every one of them should be put down. Taken out to the edges of the camp where they buried all the failed test subjects and shot point-blank in the back of the head with a silver bullet.

  Hell, she’d offer to do it herself.

  “Ah, Major. So good of you to join us.”

  Colonel Nathan Fitzgerald looked up with a smirk as Antonia entered the control room. Amusement glinted in his deep-set eyes, as though he knew she’d been pulled from her bed, and the power he had over her filled him with petty glee.

  Deliberately, she blanked her expression and gave him a poker face to look at. She didn’t like Fitzgerald, and she was sure the feeling was mutual. He was the sort of inbred, jumped-up son of a senator who never had to fight for anything in his life. A person for whom life opened doors by dint of association, who his parents were, rather than for anything he’d done or
achieved himself. For a kid from the rough side of town who’d dragged herself up and fought for every chance she’d gotten, it was sickening. He made her sick.

  He was also a bully. Rather than using his rank and position in the Project for good, for the technological and scientific advance that could be the only reason the government would do what they did to their own people, he used it to reinforce a whole new set of prejudices and racism based on his own opinion.

  “As always, I live to serve.”

  Her voice, calm and collected, revealed nothing of her bitterness as she quoted the Project’s motto back at him. Live to serve. In other words, Your ass is ours. If we can bring you back as something else, we will, and you’d better be fucking grateful.

  He wasn’t intelligent enough to read between the lines and figure out the sarcasm. Yet another worrying lack in a full-bird colonel.

  “Good. Just make sure you remember that.”

  He pushed away from the planning table and looked her straight in the eye. Everything in Antonia went still. She recognized that look. The “you’ve fucked up” look.

  “Of course, sir.”

  He had a pen in his hand, fiddling with it. Click-click. His thumb hit the end in a rapid-fire motion. Click-click. The pen nib appeared and disappeared. Click-click. The sound reverberated through her skull like the double-tap from a rifle. The tension in the room rose several notches as the other staff with them faded out of view. No one wanted to get between the colonel and his victim.

  Antonia stood her ground and gave him a rattlesnake look. Her best. It made people…human people, that is…uncomfortable as hell. Something in their brains clicked on when she looked at them like that, and ramped their survival instincts up to maximum. Full-Bird Fiztgerald was just too fucking dumb to realize the danger signs when he poked at the tiger with a stick.

  “I have always run this camp with fairness and equality in mind, no matter what ethnic or species origin our staff are…”